


Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

by YumeNoTsuzuki (Yumejin)



Series: Harrymort Prompts [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Depression, Eating Disorders, M/M, Murder, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Sexual Content, infidelty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 14:04:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/586169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yumejin/pseuds/YumeNoTsuzuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginny had been so absorbed in her own happiness that she completely failed to notice how cold and withdrawn her husband had become. By then, it was much too late, everything had fallen apart and she desperately wished she had never found out why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IsysSkeeter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IsysSkeeter/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [IsysSkeeter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IsysSkeeter/pseuds/IsysSkeeter) in the [HarryMort_Prompt_Night](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/HarryMort_Prompt_Night) collection. 



> Look back up at the warnings in additional tags, then do so again before you read this fic. It's dark and depressing, so tread carefully. I really enjoyed tormenting all three of the characters, it was a very twisted piece and a bit of a challenge too. There are likely some mistakes still lurking, I will look this over again at some point, but I think it's good enough to upload as it is anyway.

**_Part  1 – White Vow_ **

Ginny knew very well that their marriage was slowly falling apart. Harry had not been himself for a long time now. He was so cold, so distant, distracted. Nothing she could do would make him look at her with love again, just like he used to every time he saw her. He was an empty shell of his old self, walking, talking, and breathing… but not really there. Once again, she was standing in front of the mirror – her body looking thinner than ever, hopefully good enough for _him._ She even dyed her hair black, hoping to please her husband. Dressed in blood red lingerie, she waited for him in bed each night, perfectly made up and ready for him. Why wasn’t it enough? He almost never touched her anymore and whenever he indulged in her flesh on a rare occasion, it was forced, mechanical and left her feeling dirty. _Used._

She tried so hard to fix things. Their marriage used to be perfect. She fell for Harry in her first year at Hogwarts, when he saved her from the memory of Tom Riddle from the diary. He was so kind and brave and willing to give up his life for her – for someone who was so easily manipulated into attacking innocent people in the school. She knew then, that nobody else would live up to Harry Potter in her eyes. They weren’t kind or brave, handsome, famous, rich…  She was over the moon when they kissed for the first time, hidden away in the Room of Requirement – as though separated from the whole big world of worries and war and Voldemort. Then, after destroying all the Horcruxes, he proposed to her. They bought a house, got steady jobs, planned on having children…

She had been so wrapped up in her own happiness he hadn’t even noticed when things changed. At first, Harry was having nightmares. He would hiss in Parseltongue in her ear, his voice low and sensual. The foreign words were like venom crawling into her system, forbidden, destructive but dangerously addictive. It made her skin crawl and yet she craved more, even after her breathing evened out after her peak and she wiped her hands clean before going to sleep. Harry never told her his dreams, but at the time she had thought that if it was something worrying, he would definitely tell her. He had no reason to keep secrets, after all. Then he stopped sleeping for a while. He was always so quiet and exhausted, refusing to close his eyes for even five minutes. He said it was dangerous, but how – he never told her. Eventually, he started sleeping again and everything went back to normal for a while. She had forgotten all about Harry’s odd behaviour and resumed her plans for building their own, bigger house for when they would have children. She didn’t notice for _weeks_ when he stopped talking, touching or interacting with her in any way. It didn’t happen all at once. It was gradual and insidious and she never knew until it was too late. It wasn’t until he stopped kissing her goodbye before leaving for work that she noticed something was seriously wrong with him. His eyes looked empty, closed off and impossible to read what lay beneath them. She tried, countless times, to ask him what was wrong. He would say everything was fine, just to placate her and then go on staring into space, looking like he was shut in his own mind, unresponsive to the world.

This night was no different. She’d put on her make-up and her best outfit. Sexy and teasing, but not too revealing. Ruby red. Her black hair flowed down her shoulders, contrasting eerily with the paleness of her sun-deprived skin. She waited and waited, wishing the twisting, painful hunger in her stomach to vanish altogether. Harry didn’t return until the next day, when he burst into the house, hair windswept, his cheeks flushed and eyes more alive than she had seen them in months.

“ _Voldemort is back,”_ he said in a trembling voice, barely containing his fear – or excitement – and then, everything went black. She fainted.

When she finally came to, Harry’s dispassionate face was hovering over her. Something strange and unnamed was lurking in his eyes, but she was too confused to ponder the meanings and consequences of such trifle a thing at the time.

“How?” she choked out, holding back tears.

“I don’t know, but there has been a murder of a muggle family in central London and the cause of their deaths was proven to be the killing curse,” Harry said, the odd swirl appearing in his eyes again.

“But that could be-,” she started, but he cut her off impatiently.

“Anyone, but I know it’s him, Ginny. I can _feel_ it.”

She didn’t know how to reply, so she brought her knees up to her chin and curled up like an upset child, trying not to have a complete breakdown. The old Harry would have comforted her and made her a cup of tea or hot chocolate. The man sitting in front of her merely walked away, his shoulders stiff and strained, as though anticipating a sudden impact. Only when she was sure he was gone, she let the tears flow freely down her face in silence.

*

Strangely enough, life went on almost normally after that. Well, as normally as it could get for them. Ginny monitored her weight, used anti-aging potions, cleansed her skin carefully, applied facial masks, dyed her hair all in hopes to please her husband, who was almost never there. The Order had been called back together and she saw even less of him than before. Whenever he was home, he was tired and irritable, almost never engaging her in conversation, no matter how hard she tried.

Only when she visited Hermione and Ron to catch up a little, she noticed something else was very odd. Harry had said he’d be at an Order meeting the same day and yet, her brother was here, having tea and biscuits. She didn’t even think that he might have lied at the time, until she found him sneaking back into the house in the middle of the night with an almost deliriously happy smile on his face – which faded away at the sight of her.

She decided to figure out what was wrong then. Get to the bottom of it. Her senses were screaming against the idea when she followed Harry out of the house one day, after borrowing his cloak to avoid being seen.

It was a mistake.

 

 

 

**_Part 2 – Black Vow_ **

 

Harry had been thinking of how to break things off with Ginny for a long time. He knew that marrying her had been a mistake. Now he felt like he’d been using her the entire time, which had never been his intention. He liked her, as a friend. She was pretty and smart and truly a great wife.

 

Of course, when they walked down the aisle to say their vows, he didn’t think he could ever be with anyone else. The little twinge in his scar upon thinking that had been easy enough to ignore. The first problems arose towards the most intimate part of their wedding night. Her body was lean, but voluptuous where it mattered, but somehow… not right for him. He buried the worries under a label of mere anxiety at the time, but when these thoughts did not stop, he began to truly fear he’d dragged both of them into something huge and overwhelming, which would eventually ruin their lives.  Things were calm, almost happy, but these thoughts just kept on coming back, like a poisonous cloud within his mind, slowly but surely killing him. He felt powerless to stop the turning wheels of their relationship. Ginny seemed happy and he really didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Whenever he felt ready to talk to her about some of his worries, she’d brush him off and talk about something completely irrelevant. She was bubbly and talkative, which started wearing down on his nerves after a few months. She seemed so pleased to see him all the time, but she wasn’t seeing _him._ It was as though she saw some perfect statue in him, the idealistic hero of her dreams, instead of who he was – a broken, tired man who had risked his life for others too many times to care to count.

Then came the headaches – his scar was burning so fiercely his vision blanked out at work sometimes. For weeks, anger and pain flooded into him through the cursed scar, making it impossible to eat or sleep. He eventually tried to shut out the emotions from his mind – all of them. No matter how much he hated Snape, Occlumency had come in useful many times and he was glad he learned a bit of it, even if just the basics.

Retreating deep within his own consciousness, he almost forgot how to feel anger, pain, passion, love. He shut down completely, content to live with only his thoughts for company. When the dreams – nightmares, he’d told Ginny – started invading his mind, he was instantly drawn in. So much lust and longing – the raw desire in the man’s eyes was enough to rekindle the fire of his old obsession. Tom Riddle. Older, changed – with a distinct reptilian aspect which only made him more striking. He hissed tales of death and the existence as a ghost, of what secrets he had uncovered during the years he’d been gone… of how Dumbledore had manipulated him, but was too afraid to let him know too much. He said Harry knew nothing of the true extent of his manipulations.

The low, sensual hisses were tormenting, forever echoing in his head. If Tom Riddle’s sixteen-year-old self had been charismatic, this incarnation of Voldemort was able to weave his words a hundred times better, leaving Harry enraptured with every word as they spilled smoothly from the pale, almost lipless mouth.

They discussed so many things, it was just so easy to talk, forget of all that transpired between them before that Harry often found himself disbelieving that such a charming, intelligent man was a mindless mass murderer without purpose.

 Until the news came that Voldemort had returned… Confused, scared and excited, Harry had to make sure for himself. He threw himself into spying on all of the old Death Eaters, waiting for a chance to tail one of them to a gathering. And there was the Dark Lord, terrifying and cruel as Harry had remembered him, but considerably more sane. Well, Harry’s own standards may have been slipping, but Voldemort seemed much more in control of his emotions and magic than at the height of his second rise to power – in Harry’s fourth year at Hogwarts. It felt as though it was a lifetime ago that he watched Cedric Diggory drop lifelessly to the ground and then witness the rebirth of the most powerful Dark Lord of the century.

Voldemort’s eyes seemed to follow him, even under the invisibility cloak. Yet he did nothing, but smirked at Harry, before continuing with the welcoming speech to his minions.

Something strange happened, then. The pain in his scar stopped, vanishing altogether.

The anxiety that was tightening his chest, making it hard to breathe, was replaced with excitement instead. He felt lightheaded and _aroused_ , to the point of his entire body shaking involuntarily. Confused, he fled the old manor, unnoticed by any of the present Death Eaters. He ran straight home, his heart racing.

 _“Voldemort is back_ ,” was all he could say, his feelings too intense to put into words otherwise. His mind was racing, trying fond find any explanation for the Dark Lord’s return, but unable to make sense of any of it. He reappeared virtually from nowhere, even though almost ten years had passed since Harry had killed Nagini, the last Horcrux and then duelled with Voldemort himself, barely coming out of it alive.

“How?” she choked out, her eyes brimming with barely held back tears. He felt something within him break at the sight of her, unable to move forward to hug and comfort her or say it will all be ok. He didn’t know why he felt so unmoved by her tears or why he didn’t simply tell her he’d seen Voldemort and that he’d suspected he’d been back for months already. His lips formed a thin line, self inflicted silence sealing them firmly. He felt numb and detached under Ginny’s crestfallen gaze, unable to call forth the warm affection he once held for her. So he left, his movements almost mechanical, closing the door behind him to shut out the image of his wife curled up on the bed with tears streaming down her face.

He shut himself away after that, perusing the depths of his mind for answers. Voldemort hovered in his thoughts; in all his dreams and then even every waking moment. He felt haunted, but the Dark Lord’s presence was comforting at times. He revealed to Harry the true extent of Dumbledore’s machinations. He even told Harry how he came to possess a real body once more. The parts of his soul in the Horcrux did not die upon its destruction. It is beyond wizards, even in this day, to eradicate a soul.  Instead, they dissipated, their power lost, but not gone. As long as even one piece of his soul remained living, the others could not leave this world either. He spent a decade as a hopeless ghost, searching for his lost Horcruxes. They were the weak parts of him, parts he wanted to cast out, but he had to welcome them back out of necessity. He merged back with them, slowly regaining the strength to wield his old magic and used an ancient sacrificial ritual to obtain a young, healthy body. It had once belonged to a muggle, but changed upon infusion of his dark powers. With more of his soul back came back the clarity of thinking, his old feelings and memories. He remembered his true purpose behind the hatred of Muggles. None of that mattered to Harry though. Having lived in the wizarding world for almost twenty years, he now truly saw the difference between magic and non-magic human. Muggles treated each other like filth, bred like rabbits and destroyed the very planet they lived on. Wizards, while still human, preserved the environment and only protected themselves when necessary. He didn’t care if the Muggles killed each other off, quietly vanishing from the face of the Earth while the wizards lived on as though nothing had happened.

What he cared about, was the fact that Voldemort claimed to no longer want to see him dead. He even proposed an… alliance of sorts. They would cease hostility and occasionally discuss the fate of the wizarding world and how to deal with arising problems. Harry could hardly find a fault in this plan. It protected both the sides in the war, while he no longer had to hide from the most dangerous wizard in over a century. It felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He laughed and laughed; perhaps he was finally losing it, but it felt good. He was free from being the Boy-Who-Lived, at last. Not even when he “defeated” Voldemort ten years ago, did he feel so deliriously happy. The Dark Lord laughed with him, a sound so foreign to him and yet so right – they were both free of the cursed prophecy, of Dumbledore’s expectations and of each others’ killing intent. It felt as though the shackles of their past lives were shattering, at long last setting them both free.

Instinctively rather than with purpose, he found himself in the Dark Lord’s manor, within Voldemort’s arms, giving in to his long-forgotten desires.  The feelings that died along with the destruction of Tom Riddle’s diary were back – full force, even stronger than either could have expected. Voldemort’s possessive touch was sending shivers up his spine, while Harry’s desperate tugging at the Dark Lord’s overflowing robes only made him even more aroused. They gave in to the temptation almost too easily, with barely any words exchanged in-between. Harry’s body was more responsive than ever, writhing under Voldemort’s experienced hands, which both claimed and worshipped his naked flesh. He’d never thought he could get so turned on by another man until now, even though he had experimented with other boys while he was at school. This… didn’t compare, it was so much more intense and overwhelming and amazing than anything else he had ever experienced. Voldemort wasn’t particularly gentle or careful, but he did not hurt Harry. It was rough and fast, making him grasp onto the Dark Lord’s body as though it was the only real thing in existence. The heat and the hardness within him were pushing in and out fast, making him almost beg for more.

It was over too fast for his liking, leaving a lingering longing for _more._ If the seductive smirk on the Dark Lord’s face was anything to go by, he wasn’t satisfied yet either. Reluctantly, they parted and Harry returned to his house with a heart heavier than ever, but still, he knew he could not put aside the drug the Dark Lord had become to him. Ginny, for all her natural beauty, didn’t hold a flame to Voldemort. Even all her efforts to please him had been in vain; now that he had tasted and felt the Dark Lord’s skin on his own and explored his body more intimately than he had ever remembered doing with her. She looked weak, starved and broken, merely a shadow of the woman he once thought he loved. There was no fire in her eyes anymore. He knew he was doing something truly horrible to her, even if she didn’t realise any of it… but somehow he could not bring himself to feel guilty. It was as though a part of him had died, taking all involved emotions with it. He felt numb again, as though all the feeling had seeped out of him suddenly. While he was with Voldemort, he felt full of life, excitement and passion, yet the moment he stepped foot inside of his home, he turned to stone. He didn’t understand why, although a small part of him was beginning to realise it. He was merely in denial of the horrifying truth.

 

Without meaning to, he returned to Voldemort night after night, the act of betrayal engraved in his very soul so thoroughly it felt like a part of him now, unable to be rid of or cleansed. It was both his freedom and his prison, an eternal stalemate in his heart.

And then the choice was made for him.

Voldemort was thrusting into him enthusiastically, hissing sweet, seductive poison into his ear. Harry was moving up to meet his motions, just to feel more, deeper, harder… Through muddled, dazed thoughts he noticed that the Dark Lord was not looking at him, but at the slightly opened door, his teeth revealed in a twisted, victorious smile. There was nobody to be seen there, but with a sinking heart Harry realised just who had witnessed him in the height of passion with his supposed enemy.

Ginny, his little red headed sweetheart, was likely under the Invisibility Cloak, tears streaming down her face, unable to utter a word as the Dark Lord thrust into her husband, claiming him for his own. The raw lust and force clashing between them, stronger than anything she could incite in him. Harry’s entire body trustingly revealed, submitting freely to another man, the murderer of his parents…

And yet, he didn’t stop responding to the possessive caresses on his stomach and sex, arching up on the bed with a loud moan spilling from his lips. He had made his choice when he set foot in the Dark Lord’s manor willingly. It was her turn now – she could storm in, objecting to their illicit relationship and get killed by the man fucking Harry or leave and forever hold her peace, likely never seeing them again. He might have imagined the choked sob from behind the door when Voldemort thrust into him for final time, spilling himself inside of Harry’s eager body. Maybe she was never even there, he would never know.

He never returned to their home after that. He didn’t need to see her face again, did not need to be reminded of her expectations which he failed to live up to. He was nobody’s knight in shining armour. He was no hero, either… just another fallen warrior, reborn to fulfil a different destiny.

He was Voldemort’s lover and co-ruler. They were feared across all countries, their names too frightening to utter. Harry only remembered his red-headed, lively wife on every anniversary of her death… maybe it had been suicide, after all, nobody could tell… and he shed a single tear for her tormented soul, before returning to his lover, ready to forget her for another year.

 

**_Part 3 - Epilogue_ **

 

Lord Voldemort always got what he wanted, even if it took longer than expected to finally have it within his grasp. This always held true, even for the most frightening anomaly in his existence – Harry Potter. He had fought bravely, if for all the wrong reasons, under manipulation and a decade’s worth of lies. And yet, he eventually succumbed to the unwittingly planted Horcrux of the Dark Lord which lived within his body. It had been poisoning his mind, slowly but surely bending it to the will of its creator. Harry never realised he was being seduced by the darkness until he fell right into the heart of it, already too absorbed in its addictive glory to ever escape. Perhaps he had realised it, at some point… but did not care to protest it. Too numbed by the Horcrux, he had no desire to reach out for the light again. He had come to accept his fate, content to become one of those he once fought. This pleased Voldemort greatly, for he had desired the powerful young man for a long time, both as an ally and a partner. The delectable body was also not lost on the Dark Lord, for he worshipped it inch by inch, every night, endlessly reaffirming his affections for his new lover. Harry thrived in his company, his power grew and he seemed to become even more beautiful and terrifying each passing day. Under his careful tutelage, his lover had become an excellent dueller and a formidable Dark Lord in his own right.

 

There was nothing that could part them now. He hadn’t hovered in the miserable hellhole as a ghost for nearly a decade, if not for the determination to meet with Harry Potter again. Not even Ginny Weasley could steal his Harry now, because he made sure to kill the little ginger bitch the moment he got the chance. He delighted in seeing her frail, starved body fall to the ground to the sound of bones breaking and a last heaving breath. She was just as pathetic in death as she had been in life. Now she would no longer remind his lovely Harry of the unfulfilling life she had forced upon him with her unrequited love. His lover’s attention would never again waver from him and _only him…_

And Voldemnort, too, could direct all his focus to the new life ahead he had with Harry, in their castle of black stone and high towers, with servants to call upon all hours of the day and night – in the Wizarding capital of their Dark Kingdom, which they would rule together with an iron fist of fear and death, for many centuries to come.


End file.
